Here’s Lil B’s NYU speech in full

“I’m in the building with the future,” Lil B proclaimed as he took the stage at NYU last night for his much-anticipated speech. Gearing up for the event, he had said the speech would change lives. I don’t know if it did that, exactly, but it sounds like it was pretty awesome.

The rapper framed the speech like a Quaker wedding, inviting anyone to talk and chime in on the conversation if they were so moved. And from there he began advocating a utopian vision of peace, love and understanding.

“I specialize in love. I love to spread love – that’s what I’m here to do,” he said. “I didn’t come here with a scripted speech. All I can do is come here and spread love.”

Along with hilarious impromptu bits like, “I’m the first rapper to adopt a tabby cat. I adopted it straight from the ASPCA, you feel me?” he did, as promised, drop some heavy-duty inspirational wisdom:

“This is the big thing I want to speak on – nobody asked to be born. I didn’t ask to be who I was – nobody did that. You didn’t ask for that. So when you see people, forgive and accept. You gotta open your mind, and say life is hard. Kinda. Kinda hard…”

“A lot of the tone I see is like, If you get hit, hit back. Why is that? You can have million stones thrown at you, and you can still be positive.”

“I had a lot of hood credibility. I worked hard to get some of my imaginary hood respect. But at the end of the day, there’s no respect in being violent and a coward for no reason. There’s no honor in picking on people. There’s no honor in senseless violence. There’s no honor in war.”

Check out video excerpts as well as a stream of the full speech below.